Anatomy Trains

In the winter the sunset lasts for hours. Finally released from a string of welcome but unending Sunday drop-ins, I headed for the shore as the sun went low to bail Dad’s boat of the latest rain, but then went on and on though the woods, alternately crouching and working with silence in silence, then crashing at speed between branches in the undergrowth - scaring the deer and crows ahead of me.

One of the few times in Maine that you can be warm yet in the woods with no bugs.

We have the tireless force for good Al Gore (oh, among others) to thank for the currency of the misnomer ‘Global Warming’. What we are more likey in the middle of is ‘Global Climate Systems Change’. The planet as a whole does seem to be warming up right now, and recent evidence suggests our activities are contributing to this, but so are other non-human factors.

But the emphasis on warming misses a larger point. Right now, we in the northeast are in the middle of an extraordinary run of warm weather - we’re all talking about global warming as it rains (simply unheard of) on the sixth of January in Maine. Who could doubt global warming when there is no ice on the ponds, the fresh-water ducks have not yet flown, the ground underfoot is muddy, and the magnolia’s all but in flower?

The people in Denver, that’s who, buried under the third snowstorm in the month. I don’t imagine they are talking about global warming out there much right now, but they are very much seeing what is really going on, which is global climate change.

The climatologists study ice cores, taken from the large ice sheets in Greenland and Antartica for instance, which reveal the year-by-year snowfall, including particulates and atmospheric gasses, for the last couple of hundred thousand years (Alley, The Two Mile Time Machine). Analysis of these cores reveals that the planet works under a stable climate for period of a few thousand years, then goes through a transitional period of wild, unpredictable weather, and then settles again into a new and didfferent system for a few thousand years, and then fluctuates wildly again.

Now the factors that precipitate these sudden launches from stable into unstable are exactly the ones we see on the move now: release of greenhouse gasses, changes in the ozone. The climate system will tolerate some variation in these levels, while still maintaining the stable climate system. At some point, some critical factor crosses a threshold, and the whole climate system goes into flux - uncontrollable, huge, unpredictable.

So the factor can vary pretty widely and still the system will adjust. Once it stops adjusting, however, there is no putting the genie back in the bottle.

We have no knowledge of whether we have already crossed some threshold into one of these wild transitions, but we do know this: We are in year 11,892 of the current stable climate era. Never has there been, in the time we know about, such a long period of one stable climate system. So we are way overdue for a shift.

Some folks, in fact, think that our activities may have contributed to the longevity of the era, the burning of the crops and cutting of the trees keep the climate within a narrow band. Whether or not that is the case, you have lived your whole lifem with all its weather variations, whtin this Stable Climate Era. Of course, not only you but all your ancestors - Jefferson, Jesus, even Noah - lived within the Stable Climate Era. The entire agricultural revolution that led to all our cities, which in turn grew our cultures, and most notably our current industrial agricultural foodstuff-delivery system - all this happened within this oddly long Stable Climate Era.

The SCE began with the end of the last Ice Age nearly 12,000 years ago. At that time, there was a mile of ice piled on top of where I write now. No soil, no people, no trees. The unstable period between the Ice age stable climate system and our current climate system was only three years (other transitional periods are usually on the 50-150 year range). Of course, once it settled into the current pattern, it took a few thousand years for the ice to retreat and leave New England as the ledge-ribbed, bone-scraped, stone-walled - and now sodden mess that it is this January.

So at the time Baghdad (the city we Americans now bomb with contempt) was forming as a gathering place of nomads, among the first cities within the fertile crescent, we were just getting started into the stable climate era that would carry us through the development of cotton, wheat, chickpeas, grazing herds - all the staples that made civilization possible.

So, we’re long overdue for a transition to a new system, and we’re pushing a positive feedback loop on emissions that strain the boundaries of this Stable Climate Era, and the kicker is that we will be in the transitional time, with no turning back, by the time we know that to be the case. We may have already crossed the threshold, and we may be seeing the early signs of the wildly fluctuating era in the strange warmth in the northeast, and the continual dumping on Denver.

There’s no predicting what will take place from year to year in your area if this fluctuating transitional period takes hold, and no telling when it will stabilize again, or who will be in a desert or a rainforest when it is done. Egypt wasn’t always sandy.

One set of people who are beginning to sit up and take notice of this are the insurance companies, and especially the re-insurance companies who spread large risks around - they are very interested in trends, and they see the trend toward higher weather-related payouts - on the scale of billions. It could easily rise to trillions if current trends continue.

One other prediction is sure: the price of food will skyrocket. When our industrial agricultural system - developed, refined, and automated under the Stable Climate Era - meets this degree of change, the harvest will become unreliable and the price of everything will rise astronomically. As I said on this blog a few weeks ago, get off the grid and plant a garden, and hope that the fluctuating climate allows you a crop. Hungry people go to war.

I love the current crop of young folks, and I agree with them that we will muddle through somehow, that this is not the end of the world. It could presage a Great Winnowing, when many of us will die, to leave a hardier stock to face the Brave New World, or maybe all of the foregoing is too pessimistic, and we will continue to cope, or even thrive.
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But I don’t think so. I don’t think my own (Western, USA) lifestyle is supportable for everyone on the planet to have. But I think everyone sees this lifestyle on TV and wants it, and therein lies the rub. Whatever the motivation, the consumption and waste continue, but so does the building knowledge. Which will win out? It’s fascinating.

The Farmer’s Almanac predicted a heavy winter of snow here in the northeast. They were right about the precipitation; wrong about the form. The temperatures have held up so that we reach early January without a decent layer of ice on the pond - I tried stepping on it yesterday, only to crack straight through - and all the snow has fallen again and again as rain.

We have a love-hate relationship with winter here- we hate to shovel and bundle up and have flights and events and driving cancelled, but on the other hand, we live here because it has four seasons, and we love to see the landscape change so radically as it does when the snow covers the ground in fantastic white shapes, quieting this world and revealing others in the uniqueness of the season.

But whether it’s global warming or an off season, we find ourselves with a Jersey winter, cold rains, sleet, ice in the corners, deep mud underfoot. Grays and browns are the colors of spring here, not winter. Winter is all white and black - most winters you can take a picture with black & white film or color film (I know, I am dating myself) and barely see the difference. One nice thing is that many more birds have stuck around at the feeder - a pair of cardinals in January!

But I digress, because rain is the great boundary crosser. The rain insures the mixing of everything, and reminds us that all skin is just a selectively permeable membrane. I was out walking the shore under a set of small granite cliffs, to which trees cling. Water from the rains seeps through the cracks, freezing at night into curtains and stalactites. You see them by the road, too, where the highway cuts through a rock formation and the seams in the rock sprout icicles and sheets.

This whole post comes down to this one observation: where the water passed through a stump, it turned the ice below it brown with stump nutrients. We wouldn’t see this, except for the slowing of time achieved by the freezing: the fluids in us are constantly exchanging, picking up bits of the environment, coloring them, giving them a taste, giving us a flavor, the flavor of everything around us, mixing them all together. The ‘rain’ inside our bodies, as well as in the world, turns us all into soup. We are all a mixed bag.

It’s a soupy world here right now. I wear my boots everywhere. I don’t mind this in April, but it’s January - I want the crisp sounds of ax chops riding on the thick air, the air dense in your throat like mercury, the ski tracks stretching behind you in the virgin snow of a forest fairyland, not this sloppy mud that drags us all down to a common life in the dirt.

In winter, you can pretend that you are separate, the eagle of the north, clean, sere, and aloof. This winter that feeling is denied us, and we wallow in the springtime mud, tied to our biological underpinnings, but without that hope of renewal that April has inherent. In other words, it’s Christmas, not Easter - we want the spiritual feeling of independence that the winter breeds, not the feeling of belonging that belongs with spring.

Here at the 44th parallel and in this solstice, by the time I run out of writing energy, it’s dark.  I began my walk at 5, and with the clouds there was no trace of light left.  I carried a little reflector light for when I was walking on the road, but something moved me to plunge off into the woods.

(Actually, what moved me was this: I had let Quan drive herself to her doctor’s appointment, when she was in bad enough shape that I should have done it.  The walk was an act of penance and of prayer to keep her safe while driving in an altered state, when I should have been driving her.  Like holding Misty’s plane up for her when she flies up here, woods walking in the dark was my way of holding Quan’s car on the road.)

Though I long ago practiced some of Carlos Castaneda’s techniques for walking in the dark, I was in no mood, and no longer of an age, for running high-kneed with curled fingers through a wood studded with granite boulders, old logging truck ruts, and darkened trees, the way I did in the green belt above Boulder in the ’70’s.

But I dropped into my hara, letting the ‘eye’ of my belly see the coming terrain, sensitizing the bottom of my feet to feel their way onto the next surface.  For a couple of minutes my literal eyes struggle to see, but then the mind relaxes and goes all receptive, and the skin on my front becomes an eye all its own.  At first I am walking down a woods path, but then I try my luck in the thick of the brush.  I stop for a minute, hearing the night birds, the scolding chirrups of a squirrel I have disturbed, and the clicks of the insects. Then I move forward, over the edge of the road and down toward the sound of the stream.

My hands are up in a kind of prayer position to protect my eyes from the branches, but by now my feet are sure, even on the slope.  Crossing the stream is problematic - I use the little red flasher to see the log, but cross it in the dark, blessing the soft-soled shoes that allow my feet a little prehansility.  On the other side, I step beside a root and fall through into some underlying water - so much for my Don Juan invulnerability.  I wring out my sock and continue, chastened.

But the rest of the walk home is a delight for the nose, skin, and ears - sensitive to the sigh of cold air off the hill with its promise of dew, the squidge of the soil in a record-breaking unfrozen mid-December - it should be cracking underfoot by now, the acrid whiff of horse shit as I come around the corner towards the barn, the startled ducks’ wings slap on the pond, then whine in the air, Camelot’s nicker, Morgan’s bark, my crunch on the driveway, the click of the doorknob, the smell of chainsaw oil in the shed, sawdust in the garage, the light switch on the right - and I am back in the sighted world.

Quan came home, safe but tired, much later.

In this Sarasota suburb where I am living at the moment, the evening walk is littered with small ranch houses, most with the most gaudy light displays.  Tonight I have seen:

The usual creches - wise men and shepherds; reindeer - white and lit; flashing signs to the North Pole; curling pseudo- pine trees; penguins on air-blown igloos; a penguin in a snow bubble; huge snowmen and Santa Clauses; Hannukah blue and white bulbs that electronically ’sing’ Chirstmas carols (!); the inevitable icicles from the eaves; and the even more inevitable palms wrapped in colored lights.

And even a patriotic Christmas display in red, white, and blue.  Happy Holidays.